Quotes from Nathanael West

better a live bird in the jungle of the body than two stuffed birds on the library table.

It was very sad under the trees. Although spring was well advanced, in the deep shade there was nothing but death-rotten leaves, gray and white fungi, and over everything a funeral hush.

Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. Tod

Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this is the worst.

Bi?u zvezda jednog dana," izjavila je kao da ga izaziva da joj protivre?i. "Siguran sam..." "To je moj život. To je jedina stvar na svetu koju želim." "Dobro je znati šta želiš. Ja sam bio knjigovo?a u hotelu, ali..." "Ako ne bude tako, izvrši?u samoubistvo.

He crossed the bridge and followed a little path that ended at a Greek temple dedicated to Eros. The god himself lay face downward in a pile of old newspapers and bottles. From

Oh, Lord, we are not of those who wash in wine, water, urine, vinegar, fire, oil, bay rum, milk, brandy, or boric acid. Oh, Lord, we are of those who wash solely in the Blood of the Lamb.

Americans have dissipated their radical energy in an orgy of stone breaking.

Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another.

He felt like an empty bottle that is being slowly filled with warm, dirty water.

It was a trapped bird, but the sound it made had no anxiety in it, only sadness, impersonal and without hope.

Except for his hands, which belonged on a piece of monumental sculpture, and his small head, he was well proportioned. His muscles were large and round and he had a full, heavy chest. Yet there was something wrong. For all his size and shape, he looked neither strong nor fertile. He was like one of Picasso's great sterile athletes, who brood hopelessly on pink sand, staring at veined marble waves.

Along with "mon hysterie" I cultivated a "rotten, ripe maturity." You understand what I mean: like Rimbaud, I practiced having hallucinations.

Her invitation wasn't to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn't expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn't even have time to sweat or close your eyes.

What a perfect escape the return to the womb was. Better by far than Religion or Art or the South Sea Islands. It was so snug and warm there, and the feeding was automatic. Everything perfect in that hotel. No wonder the memory of those accommodations lingered in the blood and nerves of everyone. It was dark, yes, but what a warm, rich darkness. The grave wasn't in it. No wonder one fought so desperately against being evicted when the nine months' lease was up.

He didn't mean to be rude but at first glance this man seemed an exact model for the kind of person who comes to California to die, perfect in every detail down to fever eyes and unruly hands.

Furthermore, having lost faith in himself, he thought it his duty to undermine the nation's faith in itself.

He sees that the majority of letters are profoundly humble pleas fpr moral and spiritual advixe, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examinatin shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not the perpetator.